


Ain't No Grave

by ancestrallizard



Category: Monster Prom (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Death, Drowning, Excessive Amount of OCs, Gen, Rating and tags are subject to change, shameless projection of high school feelings onto fictional characters, though it gets happier later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 05:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16486673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Not all monsters were born monsters.Some were born human, and one day got very, very unlucky.





	Ain't No Grave

**Author's Note:**

> Multichapter story about a voiceless player character's possible backstory. yep.

When Brian was twelve, his grandfather died of brain cancer. 

It was slow, slow enough for him to be moved into hospice, and for Brian’s parents and aunts and uncle to have time to wrangle the flood of paperwork that death carries in its wake. He overheard pieces of it through his headphones, on long car rides to and from the home and over mountains of papers at the dinner table. Changes to the will, funeral plans, arrangements for his now empty house, the DNR, and so many other things that blended together into an undercurrent of worry and anxiety. 

When they brought up his grandfather’s cat Brian, in a rare outburst, immediately declared he would take care of it. He’d gone with his grandfather to adopt her two years before, and he’d even let him name her. Like hell would he risk Church getting sent to a shelter. 

The last piece business to be sorted was the EOH. 

It had another, more scientific name, but in school and at home Brian had only ever heard it called EOH. End of Humanity. When life ended, humanity ended too – his grandfather’s first death would be his last death. The body would be cremated as soon as possible, to ensure it wouldn’t rise again, and if a poltergeist or any other derivative of his soul should appear, it would be exorcised and dissipated immediately. Round the clock watches would be placed on the locations the deceased’s ghost would likely manifest, and an exorcism-capable priest would be kept on standby for two weeks.

It was an expensive provision, and for most people it ended up a waste of money – it took enormous willpower and drive to come back as a ghost, and it was rare for bodies to return on their own without any aiding necromancy. But it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it, so after endless cyclical arguments he wished he could have blocked out completely, his parents finally signed off on it. 

His grandfather died two days later in the middle of the night. His father left right after he got the call, still in a nightrobe, and returned a few hours later stone-faced with the ashes.

Everyone was palpably on edge afterward, but when the two weeks passed and no exorcist called, tension slowly began to unknot, and quiet, standard grief supplanted dread.

He never confessed to it, but Brian had always been a bit disappointed. He would have liked to see his grandfather again, even if only for a little while. 

=

It was a cold, cloudy day, which made it was either a Soundgarden day or a Ray Charles day. 

Brian leaned back in his desk chair. “Thoughts, Church? Soundgarden or Charles?”

The gray cat curled on his unmade bed blinked at him, slowly, and chirped. 

Ray Charles it was. He picked the playlist on his phone, slipped on his headphones, patted Church once on the head and left. He considered it not because the songs reminded him over overcast skies, exactly, but because he’d first listened to the musician on such a day, when his grandfather was showing him his old record collection. As he’d played a few, wind whipped around the edges of the house, layering an eerie wilting tone over the flute and slow piano. 

It had been three years since his death, but thinking about him still made Brian feel off-balance and hollow, like a sucking wound had been cut into his chest.

Low light from outside cut through the windows and across the second-floor hallway. He hadn’t heard them come in, but both his siblings should be back home, his sister from where she’d started middle school, and his brother from the fancy private prep school a few towns over, separate from the high school Brian went to. 

(In the last days of eighth grade, before he graduated middle school, he overheard their parents talking about where he would go next when they thought their children were all upstairs. 

“Why would we do that?” His father asked, in distant way he did when he was distracted with something else. “Waste of money. Just put him in public.” 

His mother didn’t object, the conversation drifted elsewhere, and Brian drifted silently back up the stairs.)

He opened the door without knocking. This could usually be counted on without fail to piss off Daniel, but he didn’t even look up this time, fingers flying across his keyboard and eyes glued to a word document on his desktop. 

“I’m heading out.” Brian said. His older brother didn’t reply, but latent sibling-sense told Brian he’d heard him, and just chose not to answer. Fine by him. 

“Be back before Mom gets home,” Daniel finally said without looking up. Brian grunted in reply and closed the door. He knew, the same as Daniel, that it didn’t much matter when he came back. 

Ana had been scared at first to start middle school, but was taking to it like a fish to water. She was doing so well both there and with dance lessons that she didn’t need a sympathetic ear or comforting right after school anymore. So Brian was free to go. 

He took the stairs two at a time, rushed out the back door and breathed deep, feeling himself start to untense after too-long day at school. 

Even if he did stay out late, it wasn’t like there was anything he could do to get into any real trouble, much as he might have wished otherwise. It took twenty minutes by car or bus to get into nearest town, and once you got there, there wasn’t much going for it.

Though the isolation came with a few perks. Their house was bordered by formidable bands of trees, the same trees he walked through as music blared in his ears. He wandered down the slope to his destination, leaves smoldering red-orange, the grey skies dampening their full color, and birds flittering around in his peripheral vision. 

It was lonely, but in a peaceful way. It was a world of its own, complete in and of itself, and most of the time it felt like getting to be in it was the only way he stayed sane. Sometimes in summer he’d just go out there to sit and watch the world go by. 

He moved through a haze of jazz and autumn foliage until the land stopped. 

The steep cliff below, the sheer drop to sharp, salt stained rocks and twisting black water, wasn’t that bad, but he and his brother and sister still got told ad infinitum not go out there. 

He sat down on the edge, long legs dangling, and breathed in the tangy ocean air. He stared out at the writhing waves, the water that stretched on past scattered rocks too bare and small to be called islands, out to the ocean and the horizon line where the water met the dark grey sky. The long grasses itched his palms. Seagulls farther down the shore surfed roiling gusts of wind that chilled him even through his jacket. 

Along the shore was more forest, past that a few towns, and if he strained himself he could see the beginning of the highway.

Sometimes, Brian imagined packing up what few things he cared about and letting his feet guide him to anywhere that wasn’t where he was. He hadn’t been outside their insular part of the state more than and handful of times, never longer than a week, and the views outside the bus window, his classroom, and even his own window weighed on him like an iron pressing on his shoulders.

It was the only concrete desire he’d had for awhile, but he still couldn’t transmute it into willpower to stay awake in class or study harder or drum up more energy to do anything beyond what he was already managing to do. 

He sat on the edge, zoned out, music still playing, until a wet splat on his forehead snapped him out of his reverie. Wasn’t he too high up to be hit by ocean spray?

A second hit him, and a third. All at once, he realized it was a downpour. 

He pulled his hood up. A bolt of lightning arced across the sky and thunder followed on its tail, way too soon and loud for comfort. 

Brian began to climb back up the slope, calm starting to fracture under the increasingly intensifying sheets of rain. How had he not noticed that he was sitting in the middle of a storm? 

He struggled against the wind and water tearing at him with cold needle claws. He would be fine, Brian thought (he hoped) if he could just make it back to the trees. If he moved fast enough, maybe he would even get home without his jacket getting completely ruined. He’d get chewed out for going on a walk in a storm no matter what happened, his parents probably more annoyed than concerned, but it was fine, fine, he would take it all happily if he could just make it past the trees in one piece.

But he never did. 

The grass may have become slippery from the sudden onslaught of water, or the ground may have been loosened over the summer, or it may have been crumbling for decades, falling to pieces behind its stationary exterior.

Whatever the cause, the outcome was the same. 

Brian closed his eyes at the continued barrage of rain lashing his face, throwing up his arms on instinct. He stumbled back from a massive burst of wind, until he couldn’t anymore, and he couldn’t understand why his legs weren’t moving the way he told them to, or why the wind was coming from behind him now instead of tearing at his face, or why the sky was all he could see, or why it was flying away from him.

He realized, belatedly, that he had fallen off the cliff.

He wondered, absurdly, if anyone would remember to feed Church. 

Brian’s head comes down on a rock. Somehow he heard it above the storm, like a thick-shelled egg cracking on a countertop. An explosion of pain blinded him, but when he opened his mouth to scream water rushed in, freezing and salty and disgusting. 

His limbs thrashed, trying to orient himself as he sank, but up was down and he couldn’t feel anything except cold water and white-hot pain in his head. The pressure on his chest and in his ears was immense, and increased tenfold every second. Water rushed through and into his clothes, weighing him down like iron shackles. He couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think beyond _help me help me I never wanted to die like this –_

Water rushed into his nose and ears, and his throat spasmed. The pressure sent flashing light across his closed eyes as pain tore through him. Seawater dragged him down and it was all too cold and dark and – 

And then it was nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Finally done w chapter 1 of this, so i'm clear for NaNo. I'll come back to this after November probably.


End file.
